Mike Carey - The Devil You Know

Better try to rule out the obvious, in any case. I pulled the book open in the center of a signature and showed Peele that they were stitched in already folded. “Sometimes with a book that’s stitched like this, you tear a page out from the back to write a note or something, and then its partner falls out from the front a while later. Could that have happened here?”

“Of course not,” he insisted a little shrilly. “I would never do that. Not from the incident book. It would show up the next time—”

“—the next time the auditors did their rounds. It’s okay, Mr. Peele, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just wanted to make sure we weren’t dealing with a random accident. Assuming we’re not, the other working hypothesis is that someone came in here and tore the page out on purpose, to remove some reference that he or she didn’t want to become common knowledge.”

“But if I wrote it up in the book, it was already common knowledge!”

“Then perhaps what they wanted to avoid was someone drawing a link between two things that happened around the same time.”

“Such as?”

“Such as I have to say I don’t have the faintest idea.” I looked at the point where the incident book’s dry narrative line was broken. The last entry that was present in full was for July 29; August must have been a slow month. Then the dates resumed with a brief entry for September 12 (Gordon Batty’s first migraine, chronologically speaking), followed by the epic details of September 13.

“Something in August,” I prompted Peele. “Or it could have been around the start of September. Maybe even just a few days before the ghost was first seen. What else was happening then? Does anything stick in your mind?”

“August is slow,” Peele said, ruminating. “The school visits stop altogether, so all we do is collate, repair, catalog new acquisitions . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything. Nothing that stands out.”

“Well, do you mind if I question your staff again?”

He flared up again. “Yes, Mr. Castor. To be honest, I do. Why would that be necessary?”

“Like I said—to establish a context for the haunting.”

Peele thought for a while, then shook his head firmly.

“No. I’m sorry, but no. I don’t want any further disruption to the running of the archive. If you can do your job without getting in the way of the people who actually work here, then do it. If you can’t, then give me back the deposit I’ve already paid you, and I’ll bring in somebody who can do it.”

“The deposit is nonrefundable, Mr. Peele.”

“Now see here, Castor—”

“Those were the terms you agreed to. But I don’t think the issue here is whether or not you get your money back. You’ve got a dead woman in your archive, and she didn’t die all that long ago. You need to know why she’s here and why she’s so full of rage and misery that she’s attacking the living. If you don’t get answers to those questions, exorcising her could be just the start of your problems.”

“I don’t understand the logic of that statement.”

“Then think about it. It’ll come to you.”

I left him fulminating. There seemed no point in staying. In fact, the longer I hung around, the bigger the risk that he might actually talk himself into throwing me out. And I wasn’t ready to go, not yet.

I stuck my head into the workroom. “Peele wants someone to open doors for me,” I said. “Any volunteers?” This lying thing—once you got into it, it was really a fantastic labor-saving device.

Rich opened his mouth to speak, but Cheryl got there first. “I’ll go,” she said. “Sign the keys over, Rich.” Rich closed his mouth again and shrugged. There was a brief transaction in which Cheryl swapped her signature for a turn with the big key ring. Then we headed for the door.

I walked on down the corridor, and Cheryl fell in beside me. “The Russian room?” she asked.

“No. The attic.”

“The attic? But there’s nothing up there.”

“I know. My brother says nothing can be a real cool hand.”

Two nights ago, dressed in opaque shadows, the attic had looked numinous and threatening. By daylight, it just looked empty.

We went to the end room, and Cheryl followed me inside. I pointed to the cupboard.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

Cheryl shook her head. “I haven’t got a clue,” she confessed. “Why?”

“I’m just curious. Would there be a key to that cupboard on Rich’s ring?”

Cheryl flashed me a wicked grin. “Hey, smutty innuendo aside, if it’s got a hole, Rich has got a key.”

She went down on one knee and squinted at the lock on the cupboard door. Then she nodded, satisfied, and started to sort through the heavy ring of keys. “Silverline 276,” she said. “It’s the same as the ones downstairs. Here you go.”

She slid a key into the lock, turned it, and pulled the door open with a flourish.

The cupboard was empty.

“Maybe it’s got a false bottom,” said Cheryl without much conviction. She bent over to examine it, and I found myself staring at hers—which was indisputably real. My body reacted of its own accord; blood rushed to my face and to other outlying parts. Arousal exploded in me like a signal flare.

When Cheryl straightened, she could see the sudden change in my mood at once. It must have been written all over my face.

“You didn’t bring me up here to open cupboard doors at all, did you?” she demanded, reprovingly but with no real heat. “You dirty bugger.”

It was the succubus, Juliet. She’d reached inside me, which was her mystery and her power, and turned the dial on the outer casing of my libido from “normal” to “seismic.” Evidently, that wasn’t something that just went away—and being in such close proximity to Cheryl had triggered an aftershock. I braced myself for a smack in the face, but Cheryl was looking at me with a quizzical and contemplative expression on her face. I opened my mouth to explain, but she shook her head briskly to stop me from saying anything.

“I’ve never had sex at work before,” she murmured at last. “And you are pretty attractive—in a sleazy, government-health-warning-on-the-packet sort of way. You know what I always say, yeah?”

I’d forgotten, but I remembered now. “If you’ve never tried something, you’ve got no right saying you don’t like it.”

“Exactly. But are you sure you’re not letting your eyes make promises your trousers can’t keep, Castor?”

“That’s a valid question,” I said, trying to reengage the parts of my brain that weren’t connected with panting and sweating. “Cheryl, this isn’t me. This is just a sort of hangover from—”

She stopped my mouth with a kiss, which tasted very faintly of coffee and cinnamon. I had ample opportunity to taste.

When we broke off, she smiled at me again—a smile with a world of promise in it.

“Someone could just walk in,” I reminded her, making one last doomed effort to be the voice of reason.

“That’s where the keys come in handy,” Cheryl said. She crossed to the door, closed it, and locked it. Then she came back over and began to unbutton my shirt.

“I’ve got cuts and lacerations,” I warned her. “In some of the parts you may be planning to use.”

“Poor boy. Let Auntie Cheryl have a look.”

She had very gentle hands—which she used to do a number of things that were highly prejudicial to the exorcist/client relationship. I responded in kind, and things went from bad to wonderfully bad.

But even as Cheryl drew me into her with a wordless murmur of approbation, I was thinking of the parcel tape and the plastic bags. Where did they go?